Xi Xinping is not an idiot. He is also not a capitalist or an opportunist. Not sure if he’s an ideologue, I kinda doubt it. He’s not power mad, or a raving lunatic. Cold blooded SOB is a given since he heads the CCP – it’s a prerequisite. Xi Xinping is not leading China toward greatness. He might or might not know that. He’s not going to be invading Taiwan anytime soon. He’s not a madman.
Xi is what you get when you cross a bureaucrat with a strongman leader. Basically, the worst of both is what you get. Xi is consolidating his power like a good strongman. This is why he’s acting like the Chinese economy is unimportant -because it is. His power rests in the CCP and keeping it in power. Thanks to Google and a lot of stupid Western investments, he thinks he can do that AND return to the communist fold.
Chinese communism isn’t either, really. Communism is European in origin and China isn’t really communist. The communist part is mostly the goal, and the CCP acknowledges that it has not arrived. That really doesn’t matter – the struggle is the original basis for the CCP’s legitimacy (what tiny bit it still has – oh wait, it doesn’t have any). The CCP was supposed to lead China into a great communist future.
Which turned to total crap. Hint: industrializing at the expense of agriculture results in mass starvation. This was totally predictable but Mao couldn’t be bothered with details and estimates put the death toll at 50 million. By the time Mao got around to dying, China was in shambles.
Enter Deng Xiaoping who decided that revolting peasants were revolting and that he had to do something to stop that from happening. So, maybe we get creative with our concept of communism and let some people get rich first mostly by opening to the West and not being jerks about private business. China did improve – it wasn’t like it could get much worse – but the real break came when the Soviet Union conveniently collapsed.
The US likes soft diplomacy – it’s cheap and extremely effective – so it was fine with China joining the world in a little trade. WTO status was a mistake but the US was a lot distracted with trying to keep Soviet nukes out of terrorist hands and the Russians weren’t a lot of help (to be fair, they were a little busy rebuilding their nation). So began the Chinese miracle, funded primarily by the US.
The CCP’s claim to power got a little dicey. No longer were they leading toward the great communist future if Neiman Marcus was opening in Beijing. So the CCP reinvented itself as capitalism with Chinese characteristics. The upshot of which was that the CCP gets to stay in power, no one complains, everyone makes money, and the good times roll.
Murder a few weirdoes like the Falun Gong and the pesky Uyghurs who are inconveniently in the way of all that lovely Pakistani oil, just to prove you’re keeping China safe for the CCP, er, I mean the People and everything is hunky dory again.
Only not really. China’s real growth was enormous but it couldn’t keep up with China’s desires, or the CCP’s stupidity. Hey, guys, if you want to take over the world, ya might wanna wait until after you are actually the biggest kid on the block to start pushing other nation-states around. The whole wolf warrior fiasco just set off alarm bells. Suddenly, China’s actions weren’t seen as so benign.
Back in China, Xi purged the party of those annoying rivals – at least a lot of them. What little balance the party had Xi eroded over the last ten years. It’s an open question as to how much he knew about just how much trouble China was getting itself into. I suspect not as much as he thought he did. If he’s realized how precarious China’s position really was, he probably would have kept the wolf puppies at home.
What is now apparent is that Xi wants to return to the China of yesteryear. Mostly, he wants to have the CCP’s legitimacy back in the communist block. Maybe he’s an ardent communist but more likely, he’s a shrewd realist. China’s growth couldn’t continue forever. Eventually, the house of cards comes down. How to keep power in that eventuality?
Well, first, you get Google to help design the most intrusive and pervasive computer surveillance system in human history. A system that would have guaranteed a German victory in WWII because pesky saboteurs and partisans stop being a problem when you can identify everyone on a given street and hunt them down at your leisure. That kind of power makes protests and rebellion extremely difficult. You pretty much have to drive your whole population up against a wall to get them mad enough to even try to fight back. It’s a great tool for oppression.
Even better with a population used to letting the party do whatever crazy thing it wants so long as it doesn’t muck up the economy. Take a while before they notice just how fenced in they really are. Gee, thanks Google.
With the power to suppress rebellion long before it begins, Xi just needed to consolidate his power. The bow on that package happened at the 20th CCP Congress. Now, all the pieces are in place to return China to a nice, communist nation. Once again to be deeply impoverished and starving – but gotta break a few eggs if you’re going to keep an authoritarian murder machine in power.
Like I said earlier, China’s growth was largely funded by the US. China is an export economy and we buy their junk. Worse, we have turned a blind eye to their shenanigans for decades as terrorism took up a lot of our attention and our businesses like Google and Apple wanted not only cheap Chinese labor but access to their huge markets. You’d think we’d notice when they started building aircraft carriers and islands but Apple needed its Foxconn plants for those spiffy iPhones.
Trump blasted the warning call. Ukraine blew the whistle in a way getting the world’s attention back on business. And we didn’t much care for what we found. The CCP has its fingers in every pie and now everyone knows it.
All that growth was wasted in China. The CCP feared unemployment more than anything. Useless jobs are still jobs. The Ponzi scheme of a real estate market was only the tip of the rotten iceberg. China’s much drooled over markets are illusory – most Chinese people didn’t make it out of poverty and now, China is out of time. China hasn’t got a strong enough internal demand to run its economy on consumer goods and it imports all the important stuff like food and energy.
The Great Leap Backwards has well and truly begun. For all its money and power, China is heading for deindustrialization and ruin. We don’t have to fire a shot. We just quit buying their junk and we quit protecting their shipping and the threat posed by the CCP to the rest of the world simply dies on the vine.
Biden sped up the process by cutting off access to computer chips. China doesn’t have the capacity to design and make the really good ones, just the ones for the toaster. Now, toasters don’t really need computer chips, but China’s hackers and bot farms do. Same thing for their fighter jets and (snicker) diesel aircraft carriers. That surveillance system is gonna need replacement parts and upgrades. China can’t do that itself.
If the CCP stays in power, poverty and death are what await the Chinese people. But there are cracks in Xi’s armor. Even a chicken can be pushed too far and the Chinese people of today aren’t the peasants of the early Twentieth Century. The CCP itself is showing strain – most of the party membership signed up to get rich and be powerful in a powerful nation, not to be poor and powerless in a Third World joke. They are fleeing along with the wealthy. This bodes badly for the CCP.
China is teetering on the edge. The question is just which way will it fall. Back into poverty and despair?
Or into a future without the CCP. Only time will tell.
